Al-Futtaim advances customer engagement and speeds growth with Azure Databricks

Navigating a landscape marked by fierce competition, rapid change, and rising customer expectations, today’s large retail organizations need to focus on so much more than sales. Whether they’ve grown organically or through acquisition, retailers tend to accumulate sprawling tech stacks, with various business units owning unique and often duplicative platforms and processes. That makes it hard to gain a unified view of customers, operations, and performance across the enterprise and creates challenges to scaling efficiently. 

For nearly a century, Al-Futtaim has been a model of retail innovation and growth in the Middle East. It encompasses more than 100 distinct entities that span the automotive, healthcare, retail, real estate, education, and other sectors across 18 markets. As it grew, the organization faced a set of challenges familiar to all large retail enterprises: a fragmented technology landscape, siloed data, and a lack of unified customer experience. With many businesses operating their own systems, a holistic view of customers or operations across brands was impossible. 

Recognizing that incremental improvements would not suffice, Al-Futtaim’s leadership set out to fundamentally reimagine the infrastructure. The aim was to unify the customer experience to build strong customer connections, empower business units with real-time insights, increase agility and scalability, and foster a culture of innovation and continuous learning. 

“In August 2024, following the strategic vision of Al-Futtaim Automotive’s leadership, the Data Office was established to drive and implement Data and AI initiatives across the Automotive division,” recalls Nur Aitzhan, Chief Data Officer, Al-Futtaim Automotive. “Our strategy is to transform Al-Futtaim Automotive into a data-driven organization by empowering business stakeholders with curated data, advanced analytics, and AI-powered solutions.”

Laying the foundation: leadership and vision

To achieve its vision, Al-Futtaim realized it would have to replace longstanding systems with a flexible, scalable environment that could support rapid innovation and growth while adapting to evolving business needs. It would also need to ensure compliance and build trust by meeting local data residency requirements and providing transparency to both customers and internal stakeholders. These criteria formed the foundation for Al-Futtaim’s strategic shift toward a modern, intelligent data platform.

Al-Futtaim’s transformation wasn’t about modernization for its own sake. 

“The transformation strategy was built on five pillars,” says Himanshu Shrivastava, Group CIO and CTO at Al-Futtaim. “Around technology, those were cloud, digital core, data, and digital enablement. The fifth was around people.”

With Microsoft advising on technologies that would become the backbone of a new architecture, every decision was mapped directly to business needs.

Committing to the cloud

The journey began with a commitment to become a 100% cloud-enabled organization. “One hundred percent on cloud. That was our vision,” Shrivastava explains. “We migrated all non-SAP workloads to Microsoft Azure, then looked at how SAP workloads could migrate to Azure. We wanted to modernize and optimize, not just replicate what we had.“

The next step was the migration from SAP ECC to RISE with SAP on Azure. “We’ve always been a big SAP shop. To lead the business transformation, we wanted to uplift it to create a state-of-the-art platform, and RISE with SAP S/4HANA on Azure helped us achieve that,” Shrivastava says. 

Azure provided the backbone for scalability, security, and compliance. “Azure was the only cloud provider providing data residency in UAE, which was a big plus,” notes Geeta Raghuvanshi, Chief Product and Technology Officer for Blue, the company’s popular loyalty app, at Al-Futtaim. “We built the platform in three high-availability zones on Azure because we wanted a platform that’s scalable and risk-free.”

As a result of the elasticity of Azure, Al-Futtaim can scale resources up or down, optimizing costs and performance. “In the cloud, everything’s much faster, much easier, and I would say even much more secure,” Aitzhan says. “Azure allows us to manage data in a more robust and controlled way, supporting governance, lineage, and security across the entire platform.“

The leap to AI-enabled insights and actions

Soon the focus shifted to breaking down silos to enable data-driven decision-making. Azure Databricks became the core data platform, with Microsoft Fabric delivering a unified analytics platform. Interoperability between SAP Joule and Microsoft 365 Copilot helped drive deep business and customer insights by enabling seamless access to SAP data from Microsoft 365 Copilot.

“With everything on Azure, we can use Microsoft 365 Copilot and SAP Joule to predict customer behavior, generate actionable insights, and automate key workflows,” says Shrivastava.

“Using Azure, we’re innovating with Azure Databricks, Fabric, Power BI, and Microsoft Foundry to further enhance insights and the customer experience,” Aitzhan adds. “For example, insights based on mileage, maintenance history, and online visits to Al-Futtaim dealer websites can trigger personalized marketing messaging. These messages can then be sent to existing Toyota or Lexus customers who are in the market for a new car, or they prompt a salesperson to reach out to suggest a test-drive.”

To democratize innovation, Al-Futtaim chose Power Platform. “We want to ensure that every business user is enabled through Power Apps, Power BI, across the organization,” Shrivastava says. “Democratization of technology ensures that innovation is not limited to IT, but accessible to every employee.”

The transition to a single, flexible source of truth precipitated a significant cultural shift around decision-making. As Raghuvanshi reflects, “We used to rely on hypotheses and assumptions to guide decisions. Now, by collating customer data and behaviors into a single platform, we break silos, personalize experiences, predict needs, and make smarter, data-driven decisions.”

Behind the technology driving those decisions, Shrivastava emphasizes that people remain a critical element in seeking, interpreting, and activating the insights AI uncovers. That’s why change management is such a critical focus area for Al-Futtaim.

“We have our Chief AI Officer setting the strategic direction and driving the transformation agenda, senior people in each division acting as AI champions, and they have people who are data and AI stewards,” Shrivastava says. “They’re all focused on explaining and evangelizing human and machine convergence and demonstrating that we’re not embracing AI and technology to replace people; we’re embracing them to grow and multiply our scale.

“We want to eliminate any insecurity around AI and let people see that by using AI or Copilot, they can deliver quality results faster, rather than working longer,” Shrivastava continues. “Explaining that is very important, as is upskilling and reskilling them for the new ways of working. We also run AI summits every six months, where the entire organization comes together so leadership can showcase what we are doing and why we are doing it.”

Creating an intelligent customer engagement platform

With so many market opportunities, Al-Futtaim knows building meaningful relationships with customers is essential. To foster those relationships, the company created Blue, a lifestyle platform that offers exclusive rewards and experiences to enrich everyday life for customers. 

Built on Azure and Azure Databricks, the Blue platform unifies customer data and engagement across more than 200 brands. With a monthly active user base of almost 600,000 members, Blue is a powerful engine for driving awareness and advertising.

“Blue is more than a platform; it’s a catalyst for change,” says Shrivastava. “Using data, AI, and automation, we’re redefining customer engagement and driving incremental value across our diverse portfolio. Whether it’s shopping for the latest fashion at Marks & Spencer, exploring new real estate opportunities, or booking a test-drive in a Volvo, we can engage them and guide them every step of the way.”

Advancing AI-driven innovation at scale

Al-Futtaim is using AI to enhance every aspect of precision-targeted campaigns for its many brands, from timing to strategy to content generation. “Now we can quickly customize marketing assets we receive from brands like Marks & Spencer to the needs of the market,” explains Shrivastava. “For example, we might receive a photo of a woman wearing jeans but need to make it compliant with Middle East sensibilities. We can do that with AI, load the image into our digital asset management platform, and use the marketing engine to integrate the modified image into a campaign.

“With 7 million-plus users across 10 markets, Blue has monetized its digital services and is already generating revenue internally and from external partners and merchants. Al-Futtaim expects Blue to be a large, self-sustainable digital business in a few years,” reports Shrivastava.

One way it expects to accelerate growth is by expanding Blue with an AI-powered tourist companion feature, connecting visitors to Dubai with member businesses through highly personalized experiences.

Another important growth engine is monetizing digital services within the Blue platform, expanding its reach and creating new revenue streams as it attracts more external brands to market under the Blue umbrella.

With AI still in its infancy, the possibilities seem endless. So where does an organization like Al-Futtaim begin? 

“At Al-Futtaim, we began with a theme of accelerating to execution. We experimented with everything to understand the possibilities we can activate,” explains Shrivastava. “Now we’re focusing on vision to value—looking at value from various aspects, from productivity and cost optimization to, obviously, revenue generation.”

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